[Pythonmac-SIG] Package installation

[Chris Barker]

konrad.hinsen at laposte.net wrote:
>> Can users be trusted to put Python packages in the right place on 
>> their own?  If they have multiple versions of Python installed? I 
>> would say no.
> 
> They do manage for applications, so why wouldn't they for Python packages?

No, they don't. Mac users put Applications all over the place on their 
systems. In fact, one of the main advantages of the self contained 
application bundle is that you can do exactly that: put it anywhere, and 
you can click on it to run it. The old Macintosh was specifically 
designed to support that kind of behavior. They advertised the fact that 
files could be moved all over the place without disrupting the system 
(this wasn't entirely true, when it came to the system folder, but it 
was a lot more true than with Unix or DOS/Windows). That legacy lives 
on. If you don't give Mac users an installer, many, many, people will 
drop a bundle some arbitrary place, and expect it to work.

That being said, better uninstallation and version managing would be 
great. This is one place that Apple is WAY behind the Linux distros. 
They all have package managing systems, many of them pretty darn nice.

I'd love to see some kind of package versioning management built into 
things from the Python side, one that will work across platforms. 
wxPython has a pretty good approach:

http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/MultiVersionInstalls

-Chris




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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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